


does not stand for "clean, pretty, reliable"

by Magpied_Spider



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Jack Zimmermann's Overdose, M/M, Zimmerparents are present but very minorly, this is not a happy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 07:56:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20386315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magpied_Spider/pseuds/Magpied_Spider
Summary: Three things. One: Kent Parson found Jack Zimmermann overdosed in the bathroom. Two: Jack Zimmermann did not suffer any kind of brain damage, despite brain damage starting to occur around the six minute mark. Three: If someone on the scene is already doing CPR, it's much more likely that the casualty will be OK than if you wait for an ambulance.ORDoctors-abcd rings in Kent's mind as he kneels down next to Jack, who isn’t breathing, who has to be breathing, god, this is a horrible dream that he’ll wake up from any second.





	does not stand for "clean, pretty, reliable"

**Author's Note:**

> Context should be enough for the French, but there are hovertext translations for desktop users, and translations given at the end for mobile users.  
It's pimms week, so of course my first foray into the fandom will be me misusing my first aid course to write Sad Things about Jack ZImmermann's Overdose. #classic.

“Zimms? You up here?” The call echoes through the near-empty house. “Jack?”

They had their suits fitted last week, Jack’s is lying on his bed. At least it’s flat, Kent had let his get scrunched in his bag and then had to painstakingly iron out every last crease. “Jack, where the fuck are you?”

The lights are off in the hall, but the daylight streaming in gave plenty of light to see by. The ensuite bathroom light is on, though. Visible through the door, cracked ajar.

Kent pushes the door open, and there’s a split second where he thinks it’s empty, because Zimms is taller than him and there’s no-one at eye level. But then.

Then he sees him.

Jack’s lying on the floor in the bathroom. Kent has found him unconscious before: an innocuous figure collapsed on the couch and lightly snoring, exhausted from training; lying on the ground after too many drinks at a party, insisting that the floor was nice and cold; collapsed on the bed from hours of strung-out socialising and near-impossible to rouse, only responding in tired grunts.

This is different. He can’t put his finger on it, couldn’t identify it if you pointed a gun at his head — _ Jack’s lying on the bathroom floor — _but something is very wrong. The way he’s lying, the angle of his limbs, the way his face is pressed against the tiles on the floor...

It's the lack of movement. He’s not breathing. That’s it.

“Shit, _ Jack _!”

There’s a stream of thoughts, panicked and contradictory and incoherent:_ he’s dead and it’s your fault, he’s dying and you can’t save him, if you don’t save him then you killed him _ in a moment of sheer, blind panic before the part of himself hammering on the walls of his skull shouting all of those thoughts at once has a glass cage dropped around it. The glass is soundproof. The panic is still there, still hammering, but he can ignore it.

Kent spent a couple of summers in New York at the swimskate place four train stops away from his house. The pay had been, in retrospect, exploitative and illegal but it also meant he didn’t have to pay for rink entry and the ice time was invaluable.

The life saving course he’d done had included CPR. He’d never had to use it, despite the number of kids every summer that’d tried the high dive without realising they’d then have to swim out of the splash zone; he’d always managed to spot a problematic swimmer far before it got to that stage, but he’d done the refresher course every twelve months like clockwork until he’d gotten into the Q. There were a few posters on what to do in case of emergency on the Océanic locker room, for reference — questions to ask someone with a suspected concussion, what to do in case of drowning — and sometimes when he was waiting he’d check it against what he remembered.

Doctors-abcd rings in his mind as he kneels down next to Jack, who isn’t breathing, who has to be breathing, god, this is a horrible dream that he’ll wake up from any second.

_ Dangers _(to yourself and others): there’s no swinging electric cords that Jack stepped into the shower and electrocuted himself with, the floor is dry, he didn’t slip and brain himself on the toilet or the sink; he can’t smell vomit, just the faint shoe-polish aroma of the dodgy vodka they've been drinking for months, he probably didn’t choke. There’s an empty bottle of pills under the sink, front of the label peeled off. Jack didn’t want anyone knowing what it was he was taking, was worried what someone else might say, along with worrying about every possibility under the sun. He could lie and say it was just paracetamol, aspirin, whatever, less likely to get crushed in a bottle than in a box. Easier to keep it like this. Kent couldn’t contradict him and say he’d gone over the recommended dosage if the dosage wasn’t on the bottle.

The fucking pills, he realises, already turning him over. “Jack,” he takes his hand, slightly cool. Cooler than a living person? The bathroom’s not exactly warm. Kent’s voice is steady, somehow, the _ response _ step so emphasised he’s doing it on autopilot. “Can you hear me?” Nothing. “Can you open your eyes?” He’s not breathing, _ he’s dead, you’re too late, you’re not going to be able to do anything, it’s all your fault, you should have been with him— _ “Squeeze my hand if you can hear me,” he pleads, squeezing Jack’s left hand, then his right, in the hopes that there’ll be a squeeze back, his other hand already dialing 112. _ Send _ for help. That’s what paramedics are for. Step D if you don’t have a defibrillator and anything beyond that, but he’s not up to that yet.

He puts the mobile on speaker as he turns Jack onto his side to clear his _ airway _ , swipes inside his mouth to check he hasn’t got anything stuck inside. Undoes his shirt buttons to expose his chest, Jack doesn’t wear a chain around his neck but you’ve always got to check. Move his legs, arms, recovery position. He can’t smell anything but alcohol but better safe than sorry. No use doing CPR if he chokes — he can’t choke he’s dead, insists the voice, locked away and unacknowledged — on his own vomit, or a half-swallowed pill _ — _ do they work that quickly? Surely not.

There’s slight movement on his chest, but against the roaring in his ears it’s impossible to tell. Was it a breath? One breath a minute does not normal breathing make. Jesus Christ.

The call clicks through, the operator asking in French — fuck — what service he requires. Ambulance is the same word, at least he thinks so, and he rattles off their billet family’s address in the slight singsong he’d used to memorise it before he’d learned enough French to actually understand what the parts of the whole meant.

“ Il respiere pas” he tells the operator, trying not to trip over his own tongue, trying to remember the words Zimms had used when he talked about the fucking pills. “Il a bu plus d’alcool, il a pris pilules - ils sont sur ordonannce mais l’étiquette se détaché, je sais pas combien-”

He listens to Jack’s chest (he’s dead, he’s already dead, he’s not breathing and he’s gone forever) for a breath, for a heartbeat, for some goddamn sign that this isn’t a nightmare he’s walked into.

Nothing.

He relays this information to the operator in a calm, steady voice, and though he’s probably mangling the grammar he’s definitely understood. No response, no breathing, no heartbeat, unobstructed airways. It’s all happening at a distance, he’s going to wake up any second now.

He rolls Jack — the _body,_ he’s _dead_ and you’re too late — onto his back and starts doing compressions. _ Row, row, row your boat. _ The operator asks him if he’s done CPR before, if he’s got anyone with him he can swap out with. _ Gently down the stream. _

Jack’s parents were out, they should be back by now but he hasn’t seen them, and the mansion is huge, and they might not even be inside, and they don’t know CPR and Jack’s going to die anyway so it’s not like any of it matters. _ Merrily-merrily-merrily-merrily. "_Oui, je sais. Non, c’est juste moi," he says. _ Life is but a dream. _

The ambulance will get to them soon, the dispatcher says, she’ll stay on the line until they arrive. _ Row, row, row your boat. _ There was one in the area responding to another call that was on its way back to the hospital without a patient. _ Gently down the stream. _It won’t be long, the dispatcher promises. Keep doing the compressions until they arrive. Do you have a face shield? The dispatcher asks. If you’re not comfortable with mouth-to-mouth you can just do compressions, the dispatcher says.

_ If you see a crocodile. _ He used to keep a face shield in his hockey bag, but it had gone missing at some point last year, and he’d never gotten around to getting another one. Hadn’t seemed important. _ Don’t forget to scream. _

He’s kissed Jack so many times before, getting up in his personal space isn’t exactly intimidating. Kent pinches Jack’s nose with one hand, tilts his chin up, gives the two breaths, feels Jack’s chest rise under his hand. Not too much air,`no point blowing air into the stomach. Not much good it can do there. He can’t taste vomit, which is probably good.

“Front door should be unlocked,” he says, still in French, returning to the compressions, counting in his head. “Up the spiral stairs and we’re on the first floor up.”

He makes sure to keep it relative, it’d be stupid if the paramedics got there in time but were confused about how far up the stairs they needed to go. First floor or ground floor, is the _ premier étage _ the _ rez-de-chaussée _ ? If a house is built on a hill and there’s two streets that go past, one on the upper and one on the lower, which is the _ rez-de-chaussée _? He and Jack would bicker about it, chirp each other’s languages for what they saw as ridiculousness. “The door’s open, it’s the only light on the floor.” The rhythm of his speech is off, punctuated by the compressions. Keep count. Breathe.

He does more rounds of compressions and doesn’t feel tired, even with the knowledge that CPR becomes more and more ineffective the longer a single person does it. One person can’t be expected to do it for long.

Kind of like playing hockey. Swap out the lines, keep everyone fresh.

He’s fit. He can keep counting. He only needs to keep going.

Thirty compressions. Two breaths. In, out. Chest rises, falls, rises, falls. Jack doesn’t splutter, throw up on him, rise from the dead.

More compressions. The mannequins had a little thing in their chest that clicked to indicate you’d gone down far enough. Human bodies aren’t quite so convenient. One-third of the chest, give or take. Better to be too much than not enough. If they wake up the next day and complain about a huge bruise on their chest, about cracked ribs, well. They’ve woken up the next day.

It’s not the arm muscles that get tired. You keep your arms straight and put your body weight into it, it’s not that tiring. Kent can’t even think about the possibility that this might be tiring, because if he lets himself feel it he might stop.

You just have to keep going. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Breathe. Breathe. One, two...

A wailing in the distance might be wishful thinking, but it gets closer and then there’s blue and red lights flashing through the windows, washing the whole bathroom out in the colours.

The paramedics arrive and take over, and Kent stands to the side as they wheel him out, shoving tubes down his throat, stripping his shirt to attach a defibrillator. Slowly, he slides down the wall.

“Are you ok?” A third paramedic asks, first in French, then in English, when Kent doesn’t reply after a moment.

“Yeah,” Kent replies, hands shaking. “Uh, ouais.” Jack’s really dying. It’s really real.

It’s at that point that Alicia and Bob rush in. The ambulance was hard to miss, but it had taken them a moment to realise it was at their house, and another to connect the dots. “Jack? Ja... Kent, what happened?”

Kent, shivering, starts to sob.

They were supposed to leave for the draft that night. They’d end up on different teams, that much was a given, but they’d be playing hockey, and they’d find a way back together.

Alicia and Bob won’t be there, they’re allowed at the hospital.

Family only.

Kent had fucked his knee at one point early in the season, told Jack to go on training without him. “No point both of us missing out just because of me,” he’d said, and Jack had nodded, and seemed relieved that Kent wouldn’t expect him to skip out.

As if he would. He knew hockey was Jack’s life.

Jack had done the same, later, when he’d come down with gastro. No point in both of them being gone when only one of them was sick, no matter how worried the other was.

Kent goes to the draft. Jack would have wanted him to. Would have told him to in the note, if he’d thought to leave one.

Alicia will tell Jack that she and his father will never forget the sight of him in that bathroom, that he was lucky there was an ambulance nearby. That his heart had stopped, that he was so, so lucky.

The TV shows draft highlights on the news even days after the fact. The tone of the dubbed over French doesn’t match the look on Kent’s face in the interviews.

“I don’t want him to see me,” Jack says to his father. “He should focus on the hockey.”

“Jack, he was so upset--” Bob starts, but Jack holds firm.

“You weren’t supposed to find me,” he mutters, and doesn’t hear Bob’s equally soft, _ we didn’t, _nor anything that comes after.

**Author's Note:**

> French translations:  
“He’s not breathing,” ; “He’s had a lot of alcohol, he’s taken some pills -- they’re prescription but the label’s come off, I don’t know how many--”  
“Yes, I know how [to do CPR], no, it’s just me”  
I once spoke French but I am unfamiliar with Quebecois (though some googling did tell me it no longer uses double negation which, nice), any speakers who want to chime in and say I’ve mucked it up are welcome to offer corrections (although the watsonian explanation is that french is a) not Kent's first language and b) he's Very Stressed). the dispatcher deliberately does not have quote marks because she's speaking french and also kent's mind is barely registering what she's saying
> 
> To slightly misquote my first aid instructor, if you think someone needs cpr, start doing cpr, if they don’t need it they will let you know very quickly.  
The acronyms Kent goes through are DRSABCD (danger, response, send, airway, breathing, compressions, defibrillation), though he doesn’t get to D, and COWS (can you hear me, open your eyes, what’s your name, squeeze my hand). He skips the W, like most people at my course, because if you haven’t answered can you hear me it’s pretty unlikely someone’ll reply. The ratio of compressions to breaths is 30:2; conveniently, if you sing through row row row your boat twice that’ll give you a) the tempo and b) the right number of compressions.  
According to what i looked up, compressions-only cpr has been taught since at least 2008, so Kent would have encountered it.  
so, kent found jack, huh? scream with me, my tumblr is rowingviolahere


End file.
